As reported today by the New York Times here, we are releasing our research study this morning on “Privacy and Cloud Computing in Public Schools.” Districts across the country are widely and rapidly adopting cloud services to fulfill educational objectives and take advantage of opportunities for cost savings and 24/7 services. Disturbingly, privacy protection for the children’s data is essentially lost in the cloud.

Our study looked at all the cloud computing contracts, district policies and parent notices from a national sample of school districts. We focused on K-12 public schools and examined how school districts addressed privacy when they transferred student information to cloud computing service providers.

Every day that we learn more about various countries’ data surveillance programs, one point keeps coming up: national data surveillance seems to have few privacy boundaries that the law has effectively protected. In a new essay that I just posted on “The Data Surveillance State in the United States and Europe,” I take a look at how the democracies on both sides of the Atlantic are trying to balance the legitimate needs of the law enforcement and intelligence communities to access online transactional data with the basic rights of citizens to be free from state intrusions on their privacy.[Read more...]

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Freedom to Tinker is hosted by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you'll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center's faculty, students, and friends.